Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust

Forty-nine years ago, Ashley Yost’s grandfather sank a well deep into a
half-mile square of rich Kansas farmland. He struck an artery of water
so prodigious that he could pump 1,600 gallons to the surface every
minute. Last year, Mr. Yost was coaxing just 300 gallons from the earth, and
pumping up sand in order to do it. By harvest time, the grit had robbed
him of $20,000 worth of pumps and any hope of returning to the bumper
harvests of years past. “That’s prime land,” he said not long ago, gesturing from his pickup at
the stubby remains of last year’s crop. “I’ve raised 294 bushels of corn
an acre there before, with water and the Lord’s help.” Now, he said,
“it’s over.” The land, known as Section 35, sits atop the High Plains Aquifer, a
waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel that begins beneath Wyoming
and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas Panhandle. The
aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many places to
last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly
tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by
drought. Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer
support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the
irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already
gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to
supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers. And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the
aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains. This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making,
imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm
but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and
tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of
depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds.
Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up
as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and
even hundreds of feet...more